It's become second nature for us to whip out our phones to take and share photos of fascinating things around us. This weekend, you can do it for a higher calling: To help scientists document Los Angeles' biodiversity by snapping photos of its wildlife and nature in the annual City Nature Challenge.
"We're talking about any life or evidence of life. So it could be a mushroom, a plant, an insect, a nudibranch slug in a tide pool," says Lila Higgins, a co-founder of the challenge. "It could even be a track or some poop of an animal or roadkill."
The nice thing is you don't need to go far to discover nature. "Most of the photos people take are of things that they see in their own neighborhoods, in their parks, in their schoolyards, or even their own backyards," Higgins said.
How it all began
The idea to crowdsource photos of urban nature came to Higgins and her friend and colleague Alison Young about eight years ago. The two have long worked to promote community science — the public participation in scientific research; Higgins at the National History Museum in L.A., while Young is at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
When former President Barack Obama declared the first-ever Citizen Science Day in 2016, the two friends decided to make a fun project out of it — by urging people in the two cities to send in photos of their environments via the free iNaturalist app.
"We were like, 'let's have a challenge between L.A. and San Francisco and see which of our two cities could find the most, quote unquote, nature in our cities,'" Higgins said.
Some 20,000 observations were documented during the inaugural event. From there, the challenge grew to comprise of 16 cities in 2017. Today, nearly 700 international cities are participating.
"Last year we had about 20 cities in India, this year we have 205 cities in India," said Higgins, illustrating the challenge's exponential growth.
Last year, they said the challenge yielded some 1.8 million observations of 57,000 species globally.
How L.A. is doing
In Los Angeles, Higgins said there were about 25,000 observations last year — about 10,000 less than its pre-pandemic high. They said one of her goals is to get more Angelenos to send in their discoveries during this weekend's challenge, which ends on Monday, April 29.
After that, iNaturalist users and scientists will work to identify what's been captured in these photos.
"There's a lot of nature in L.A., [but] that's not the perception people have," said Higgins. "We really wanted to engage the public to demonstrate that really there's a lot of biodiversity in cities."
A few of L.A.'s contributions
These community efforts have contributed to scientific understanding and study of the city's biodiversity.
Last year, Higgins said a photo of a weed turned out to be the federally endangered slender-horned spineflower, which lives only in California. In previous years, submissions have captured the Palos Verdes Blue, a butterfly native to its namesake area that was thought to have gone extinct.
"There's rare and endangered species that are getting documented, but there's also really cute things," said Higgins, like photos taken of a great horned owl and its baby owls in a nest on a cliff."
All these photos, Higgins said, are "helping the science field at large to be like, 'Yes. There is things worth studying in our cities. It's worth studying urban biodiversity.'"
How to participate
For details on how to participate, including how to download the iNaturalist app and upload photos, go here.
